Nonplanar ring resonators, such as that disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,110,045, issued Aug. 29, 1978 to Smith et al. and assigned to the present assignee, use a block of material having several surfaces cut at predetermined angles to support mirrors for generating a non-planar path having a predetermined amount of image rotation. While such resonators work satisfactorily when used as ring laser gyros, they have one inherent disadvantage in that the resulting shape has been highly nonsymmetrical. This complicates the manufacture of such resonators since the block has to be rotated through a plurality of different angles. Additionally, some of the optical elements in such path, such as mirrors, produce a scatter distribution which varies as a function of beam movement. If the scatter distribution changes as the beam position changes, for example, due to an expansion of the block, such changes introduce a variable amount of drift in the output signal generated to indicate the rotation rate.